Comment on Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome
Senal@programming.dev 4 weeks agoTL;DR;
They have an effective monopoly and have repeatedly shown they will use it to serve their needs.
One concrete way is the level of control that google has over the inner workings on the rendering engine giving it significant control over web standards.
A real life example fo this is the controversy around the JPEG-XL format, google decides to drop support for it, doing so removes support for every single browser based on the rendering engine in chromium (eventually).
Now, other browsers ( firefox for example) have to decide if it’s worth it to add in and maintain support for a format that will only work in their rendering engine.
Sounds like a win right? now firefox has a feature that chrome doesn’t.
Now, developers/businesses have a choice.
- A: Add/Maintain/Test features that use the JPEG-XL format exclusively, this feature is only available to the Y% of people not using a chromium based browser.
- B: Use some other format that is supported in chrome (and other browser).
- C: Do A with B as a fail-over, adding additional cost to development/maintenance and testing.
In almost all circumstances, B is the fiscally responsible option, which means that google has effective control over web standards and their implementation.
A non rendering engine example is ad-blockers, google decides there are underlying security issues with how some integrations with the web browser works, this “just so happens” to break how almost all decent adblocking is done at a browser level.
They go ahead and create an updated version of the specification that describes how this interaction works, implement this upstream and suddenly all chromium based browsers now can’t use the most effective adblockers.
Technically the downstream browsers could do some shenanigans to keep the ability to block ads effectively , but the technical and monetary barriers to such an endeavour are so high it is absolutely not worth it.
There is more technical nuance to this story, the security issues are real in V2 but the need to break adblockers in process of fixing these issues is debatable.
0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
yep, that’s why I don’t think selling chrome will fix the issue.
Senal@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Depends on what issue they are trying to fix.
Chromium is a problem but it doesn’t seem like that’s what they are trying to address here.
I was talking about the technical monopoly wrt to rendering engines and web standards, Chromium is a problem but it doesn’t seem like that’s what they are trying to address here.
From that article it seems like they might be trying to separate chrome in hopes that that will enable the new owners to “decouple” it from google search.
If that’s the case it’s a dumb move if it’s the only move they make, all that would happen is google would just build the new owners a scrooge mcduck swimming pool to make google the default search. Same thing they do with firefox.
It even says that in the article.
It would be interesting to see how they’d deal with the decoupling of the built in google proprietary panopticon bullshit.
They’d struggle to shift that over to chromium without upsetting…well…everyone.